Here we go again!

(from the September, 2005 issue of National Fisherman)

Going by what’s being presented by the popular media, no one could be faulted for assuming that our fisheries and the system that manages them are going to hell in a handbasket. In recent years the doom and gloom observations and predictions have become much more common, and much more pessimistic than is warranted by the actual conditions of our fisheries or of our fisheries management system. Looking at two recent examples:

Some fairly intense coverage a month back concerned a survey of scientists presently or previously em-ployed by the National Marine Fisheries Service that revealed that, on orders from “higher up,” the sci-ence underlying fisheries management decisions was being subverted. The source was a press release by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility announcing the results of a survey by that group and the Union of Concerned Scientists. The survey went to 460 NMFS “scientists,” both current and ex-employees. The dramatic results were reported from  “a strong majority (58%), more than half of all respondents (53%), more than one third of respondents working on such issues (37%)” and “nearly one in four (24%) of those conducting such work.” From the release, and from the media coverage it spawned, it appeared as if most of the science, and accordingly, most of the management measures coming from NMFS had been corrupted by politics.

So, as seemingly attested to by most of its in-house scientists, is the federal agency (that we’ve all had problems with from time to time) so mired in politic as to be ineffectual in managing fisheries? Going beyond the press release, I took a closer look at the study. The 460 “scientists” who were surveyed weren’t anywhere near all of the scientists working for NMFS. In fact, according to the Agency leadership, there are about 2,000 scientists currently working there, most at the regional science centers and the Office of Science and Technology in DC. Neither the scientists at the Science and Technology Office nor the regional centers received the surveys. So who was actually surveyed is apparently an open question.  

But let’s assume that all 2,000 NMFS scientists had been surveyed and that there is a pool of another 1000 who worked there but left. Perhaps a sixth of the available scientists received the questionnaire. This wasn’t revealed in the press release. What was revealed was that 27% of the recipients returned it. So a maximum of 124 scientists out of a possible 3000, or 4%, responded. “More than half of all respondents” is a maximum of 2%.  “Nearly one in four” is 1%. And “a strong majority” is 3%. Some smoking gun, particularly when you consider how many of the respondents might have simply been disgruntled employees lashing out at “the boss.”         

Then this past week we read (once again), that fishing pressure was endangering the “big fish” in the world’s oceans. Based on an article published in Science (Global Patterns of Predator Diversity in the Open Oceans), the Associated Press reported “scientists say the variety of tuna, marlin, swordfish and other big ocean predators has declined up to 50 percent over the past half-century due to overfishing.” There was a spate of print and broadcast coverage of the Science report, all that we saw accepting the in-formation in the press release and written in the same vein.

Now you don’t have to be a fisheries scientist, or a biology student or anyone who has spent any time at all around a fishing dock to know that the variety of tuna, marlin and swordfish hasn’t declined at all. As a matter of fact, we have the same variety today that we had fifty or a hundred or five hundred years ago. In spite of the quote above, we haven’t ever lost a species of fish to overfishing. But the AP reporter would seem to want his readers to believe otherwise, wouldn’t he?

So, you might ask, what’s the connection between these two studies? The two lead authors of the “big fish” study, Boris Worm and Ransom Myers, are both recipients of research funds from the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Union of Concerned Scientists has gotten at least $2 million from Pew. And it’s awfully hard to see this research, or much of the rest of it that has lead to similar alarmist headlines in the last decade, as anything but part of a larger agenda.

The Pew Charitable Trusts set up a national commission that was supposed to recommend how we could “fix” our oceans, and one of the major recommendations was to junk the way we are currently managing our fisheries. And then we read – in the headlines, of course – that NMFS has become politicized and the scientists are no longer in charge. Fortuitous reinforcement of the Pew Commission recommendation, isn’t it? And ever since the Pew Trusts bankrolled the “Give swordfish a break” campaign, it’s been obvious that their crosshairs have been on the pelagic longline fleet (in spite of the amazing strides in real conservation that the domestic longline fleet has made). As a matter of fact, in "Swordfish technique depletes the swordfish population" in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997, Josh Reichert, Director of the Pew Trust's Environment Program, wrote "The root problem is not only the size of the quota, the length of the season, or the number of vessels involved. It is how the fish are caught. Use of longlines must be barred." So, it appears, Drs. Worm and Myers are marching to the same old beat.

So I’m going to make a suggestion. Whenever you see a doom and gloom headline about fishing, don’t just assume that it’s another bit of research carried out by an independent researcher. Do some rudimen-tary research (for an easy how-to, Google “Myers Worm Pew” or “Union of Concerned Scientists Pew”) and see what connections you come up with. We’re living in a world of advocacy science, and in such a world knowing who’s signing the checks is critical.

Nils E. Stolpe